Nasty French Comedy Not Without Its Charms / `Water Drops' a story of seduction, sex, control

Bob Graham, Chronicle Senior Writer

Published 4:00 am, Friday, September 8, 2000

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Anna Thomson (left) and Malik Zidi star in ``Water Drops on Burning Rocks,'' a French comedy-drama about intertwined relationships among German characters.

Anna Thomson (left) and Malik Zidi star in ``Water Drops on Burning Rocks,'' a French comedy-drama about intertwined relationships among German characters.

Nasty French Comedy Not Without Its Charms / `Water Drops' a story of seduction, sex, control

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WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS: Dark comedy. Starring Bernard Giraudeau. Directed by Francois Ozon. (Not rated. 90 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Castro.)

"Water Drops on Burning Rocks" is a mouthful of a title for a film that is an eyeful, in more ways than one.

In some respects, it is a poke in the eye.

This nasty, provocative comedy comes from a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder via French film director Francois Ozon ("Criminal Lovers"). Bernard Giraudeau plays a peevish German businessman involved in a series of liaisons with progressively younger men and women, all of them domestic power struggles.

"Water Drops on Burning Rocks" is a frontal assault on domestic bliss. It is an attack on the home front.

Two men and two women enter the claustrophobic apartment where all the action takes place, but the only way one of them will be able to leave is feet first.

Fassbinder, the live-fast, die-young and leave-an-ugly-corpse German director, set this play aside and never produced it. Ozon has turned the film almost into a commentary on the play.

This is a French film about Germans. The French director is far less instinctive, far more knowing than Fassbinder. (Ozon's "Criminal Lovers," in which lovers on the lam go deep into the woods of a contemporary, perverse fairy tale, recently opened at the Lumiere Theatre.)

In "Water Drops on Burning Rocks," Ozon keeps the four-act structure of Fassbinder's play, which begins with a seduction and progresses through role-playing and role-reversal. The man with the hot rocks, Leo, keeps changing partners in a dance for control.

ALL TOGETHER NOW

At first it's about a vain 50-year-old man and a much younger one, 20. A mystery woman appears. Then the young man's girlfriend. Before long, they're all doing the samba together.

The camera work is very formal. Everything is caught in a tight little box. So are the characters. It's no accident that Leo stands up into a crotch shot. He is a sex machine, and it's the source of his power. It's certainly not his charm. It becomes understandable why people prefer Leo in the bedroom. He's sure a pain in the neck anywhere else.

His mind clicks away as he circles the younger man and grills him for information, about his girlfriend, about his boarding school, about his mother. "I like boys who love their mother," he says.

PLAYING HOUSE

By the time Act 2 rolls around, the young man is in lederhosen and has obviously made himself at home. So this is how adults play house.

Life has been reduced to domesticity, walking around in underwear, washing dishes, vacuuming the floor, playing records. The impatient Leo marches down the hall with odd, toy-soldier rigidity, swinging his arms with precise little movements.

A mystery woman in dark glasses comes knocking at the door looking for Leo. Her name is Vera, and she and Leo have a history. She is the epitome of the tragic woman, but she wasn't always that way.

In this film, it pays to notice who is waiting on whom. When the girlfriend, Anna, arrives, it's not long before she's lighting Leo's cigarettes and getting him drinks.

Freckled redhead Malik Zidi, as the young man, takes the character from affectless curiosity through dawning awareness of the trap he's in. Ludivine Sagnier is his coltish girlfriend. Best of all, as the sad-eyed Vera, is Anna Thomson, who takes her performance daringly close to camp but keeps the audience guessing.

Leo's sexual magnetism is apparent during the deadpan samba. He's the only one who can move. Giraudeau manages quite a balancing act, making Leo both attractive and repulsive.

-- Advisory: This film contains explicit sex. ..

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